Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

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Tuesday, 19 September 2006

HD Radio prices coming down

Sangean America has announced two HD Radio receivers (actually, one receiver and one component tuner) at price points under $250 and under $200, respectively. Here's the company release. Engadget has a picture of the table model.

Many other manufacturers are selling these in the $300 range, so that got me thinking about how that compared with the cost of my first transistor radio. It was a handheld 6-transistor model that sounded a lot better when you laid it speaker-side down on top of a large empty water glass. As I recall, it cost me $21. I was in high school and remember listening to the earliest Beatles releases from WLS and KOMA on it, so it had to be at least 1963 (the earliest releases were in March). But it also seems like I bought it in the summer, so it may have been the year before. I made 75¢/hr in 1962 and $1/hr in 1963, so it cost me something like 21-28 hours to pay for the radio (harder work then, too, in some ways). So the cost of the new Sangean table model equates to the same amount of work at $9-$12 per hour. You can also plug any amount of money into this inflation calculator to see what it was worth in 2005. --Dennis